How I Found Her
My family does extended song challenges. We challenge each other with music prompts that result in wildly different tastes. It’s so fun to learn about everyone’s music taste—which is highly personal and often revealing.
It helps us all find new music along the way. Our collective taste is eclectic and I love that about us (*my chin is up, ’cause I’m so in awe of them).
So that’s how I found Anna Justen’s music.
The Story Behind the Music
The album is called MiCHOU’s DREAM (no typo there), and before you even press play, the backstory earns your attention. Michou was Anna’s childhood cat — a creature apparently devoted to music, who would plant himself beside her while she played guitar and sang. The album is his dream, figuratively. It imagines what Michou might have dreamed: a family finding peace through life’s upheavals and arriving at acceptance on the other side.
That is not a small concept for a first full album.
The music moves through addiction, loss, dissociation, and other difficult emotional terrain before arriving at acceptance. It is not a straight line. Dreams rarely are. But the destination is warmth, and you feel it arriving.
What makes the album so textured is what Justen wove into the production: her family’s actual voices, and sounds recorded inside the house where she grew up. Her parents. Her sister. The sonic fingerprints of real rooms and real people. You may not consciously hear any of this, but you feel it. There is an intimacy to this record that is hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.
What It Sounds Like
Musically it lands in dream-pop and indie-folk territory, with floaty atmospheric layers. But there is an experimental edge — glitchy textures, digital distortion, moments where the prettiness gets interrupted on purpose. Some tracks begin soft and slowly reveal something unsettled underneath. Nothing stays perfectly smooth. That is the point.
I have been listening to it while working on my computer, driving in the car, as well as cooking and enjoying early summer dinners, for that hour when the day is winding down but your brain hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
A Note Before You Press Play
Full disclosure: I tend to fall for the mood and melody long before I pay close attention to the lyrics, so I have not vetted them.
I’m simply sharing music that resonates with me.
I really hope you love it.
Listen to the song Peppermint in the video below or listen to the whole album on Spotify here.
❦